Best real time strategy games for the pc

StarCraft II has a style similar to a rock-paper-scissors approach to combat and races. When playing fast-paced games, it is important to have one of the best gaming PCs to match with all of the best real-time strategy PC games in your collection. Where most games that center on a war features just a pair of rival factions, StarCraft games takes a rock-paper-scissors approach to the combat and playable races.

The military might of the Terrans fight the insect-looking Zerg who also fight the enigmatic Protoss in a three-way brawl to control the galaxy. Each of the three factions that you play feature a unique set of pros and cons. It boasts a single-player mode of over 70 missions with three different campaigns, an expanse of multiplayer content and community made arcade modes. StarCraft requires more time-sensitive strategically made decisions with a constant feeling of urgency.

Many strategy games aren't considered the most accessible strategy games out there. As the name suggests, they tend to focus on the loftier ambitions of the genre - being convoluted and involving a lot of careful thinking and planning.

Stellaris is one of the more accessible strategy games out there while still easily challenging its players along the way. Set in space, players take control of a species during the early stages of that race's quest to explore space. Arguably, that's the most fascinating part of any science fiction journey and it leads to plenty of potential from Stellaris. You can choose to manage an empire, engage in a plethora of warfare, or learn to pursue the diplomatic route and forge partnerships with other civilizations.

There's a certain amount of flexibility here with each route offering a different form of challenge. The game's broken up mostly into three key areas - the early game of exploring and colonization, followed by governing, and finally, the ability to trigger galaxy-wide implications based on your actions.

That means that Stellaris is always thrilling stuff. With seemingly endless choices available to you, this is something that will last hundreds of hours. The Warhammer fantasy universe is a rich and diverse world to use in the context of strategy gaming, and Total War: Warhammer II truly embraces it.

Kind of like a more bloodthirsty version of Lord of the Rings, Total War: Warhammer II has you pitting different factions against each other in an epic war. Each forms part of the narrative-driven campaign mode so there's a compelling story to follow along in conjunction with the action. Combat is available in two different ways too. There's the turn-based open-world campaign mode, as well as a real-time strategy option. In either case, planning many moves ahead is vital to your chances of success.

You need to concentrate on army building and conquest, as well as resource gathering to stand a chance of surviving.

That means plenty of multi-tasking and figuring out which objective to prioritize and when. Researching new technologies is just as important here as dominating through sheer force. Being able to discover new areas is a particular joy, invoking Age of Empires style memories.

No longer do you have to focus on just having the biggest army. Elsewhere, there's a multiplayer mode as well, so you can spend time competing with friends and other players online, with the promise of no two games being the same. If you previously owned the first Total War: Warhammer game, you can combine the two to gain access to a huge combined campaign called Mortal Empires which further extends the fun.

For fans of the Warhammer universe, it's a bit of an unmissable game that can easily last hundreds of hours. Economic warfare is the name of the game in Offworld Trading Company - a game that tackles strategy from a more original perspective than most. Set on Mars, players are placed in charge of one of four off-world trading companies. It's down to their shrewd business skills if they want to become the winner. This is achieved by buying a majority stake in every off-world trading company in the game and it's far from a simple task.

The key to success mostly comes down to resource gathering. The game has 13 different resources including materials such as water, aluminum, iron, silicon, carbon, as well as more complicated ideas such as Hydrolysis reactors which can break water apart into oxygen and fuel. How the resources work out for you depend on how the game plays out.

As in other forms of business, supply and demand fluctuate constantly so it's down to you to figure out when to buy and sell and how best to work your way up in the trading world. The underground black market also plays a part if you want to get your hands a little dirtier with the option to purchase things like underground nukes that can wipe out resources before your opponents reach them, or arrange mutinies to slow them down further.

There's a keen sense of real science and real economics here which makes Offworld Trading Company more distinctive than most. In particular, it'll really grip those with an active interest in financial systems or business ethics. For those players who look at the Ancient Roman Empire and wish they could participate in it in some way, there's Imperator: Rome. It's a vast experience that primarily focuses on nation-building and empire accruing. Because of that, it can be quite daunting at times.

You have to keep an eye on a lot of things such as how best to develop your population, but also best to keep them happy. An unhappy population can lead to treachery and rebellion which anyone with a brief knowledge of history will know never leads to a good ending for the leader. Combat also plays a significant role here with each culture having a different way of waging wars, so your choice at the outset of which clan to use makes a big difference in the long term.

Just to give you even more things to consider, you also need to manage the Senate and keep court together and well controlled.

Plus, there's the matter of investing in infrastructure and maintaining your resource bases. The game has over cities to discover, along with over 83 different regions so you're definitely going to have plenty of time to sink into the world of Imperator: Rome.

When it comes to real-time strategy games, the Total War series stands the test of time. But in the case of Total War: Three Kingdom, developer Creative Assembly went above and beyond expectations to craft the best game that the franchise has ever seen over the course of two decades. At its most basic level, it explores the Chinese Three Kingdoms period in a respectful and absolutely gripping manner. Real-world heroes like Liu Bei stand in for iconic figures from Western history for a massive, complex game with a campaign mode as fascinating and endlessly entertaining as its singular battles.

With a setting that works well with the Total War brand and balanced mechanics to level it all out, it's a remarkable showcase of not only developer talent but the massive potential for the genre as well. Even if you find the setting uninteresting, you might change your mind after a few rounds of battle. Based on the iconic FPS franchise, Halo Wars 2 is an epic real-time strategy game that picks up right in the middle of the story.

The set-up is simple but the lore is expansive: there's a war raging on between the Covenant and the humans are trying to prevent them from annihilating the universe using ancient forerunner technology.

In Halo Wars, you control armies, ground vehicles, aerial units, and even the occasional orbital laser. Fantasy, too.

In the case of series with multiple entries, we've picked what we feel was the best game to play now. We might feature more than one entry from the same series if we think they're different enough that you might benefit from playing both.

Crusader Kings 3, the best strategy game of , has usurped its predecessor's spot on the list, unsurprisingly. It's a huge grand strategy RPG, more polished and cohesive than the venerable CK2, and quite a bit easier on the eyes, too.

At first glance it might seem a bit too familiar, but an even greater focus on roleplaying and simulating the lifestyles of medieval nobles, along with a big bag of new and reconsidered features, makes it well worth jumping ship to the latest iteration.

It's only going to get larger and more ambitious as the inevitable DLC piles up, but even in its vanilla form CK3 is a ceaseless storyteller supported by countless complex systems that demand to be mucked around with and tweaked.

Getting to grips with it is thankfully considerably easier this time around, thanks to a helpful nested tooltip system and plenty of guidance. And all this soapy dynastic drama just has a brilliant flow to it, carrying you along with it. You can meander through life without any great plan and still find yourself embroiled in countless intrigues, wars and trysts. Total War: Three Kingdoms , the latest historical entry in the series, takes a few nods from Warhammer, which you'll find elsewhere in this list, giving us a sprawling Chinese civil war that's fuelled by its distinct characters, both off and on the battlefield.

Each is part of a complicated web of relationships that affects everything from diplomacy to performance in battle, and like their Warhammer counterparts they're all superhuman warriors.

It feels like a leap for the series in the same way the first Rome did, bringing with it some fundemental changes to how diplomacy, trade and combat works. The fight over China also makes for a compelling campaign, blessed with a kind of dynamism that we've not seen in a Total War before. Since launch, it's also benefited from some great DLC, including a new format that introduces historical bookmarks that expand on different events from the era.

The first Total War: Warhammer showed that Games Workshop's fantasy universe was a perfect match for Creative Assembly's massive battles and impressively detailed units. Total War: Warhammer 2 makes a whole host of improvements, in interface, tweaks to heroes, rogue armies that mix factions together and more.

The game's four factions, Skaven, High Elves, Dark Elves and Lizardmen are all meaningfully different from one another, delving deeper into the odd corners of old Warhammer fantasy lore. If you're looking for a starting point with CA's Warhammer games, this is now the game to get—and if you already own the excellent original, too, the mortal empires campaign will unite both games into one giant map.

Paradox's long-running, flagship strategy romp is the ultimate grand strategy game, putting you in charge of a nation from the end of the Middle Ages all the way up to the s. As head honcho, you determine its political strategy, meddle with its economy, command its armies and craft an empire. Right from the get-go, Europa Universalis 4 lets you start changing history. Maybe England crushes France in the Years War and builds a massive continental empire.

Maybe the Iroquois defeat European colonists, build ships and invade the Old World. It's huge, complex, and through years of expansions has just kept growing. The simulation can sometimes be tough to wrap one's head around, but it's worth diving in and just seeing where alt-history takes you.

Few 4X games try to challenge Civ, but Old World already had a leg up thanks designer Soren Johnson's previous relationship with the series. He was the lead designer on Civ 4, and that legacy is very apparent. But Old World is more than another take on Civ.

For one, it's set exclusively in antiquity rather than charting the course of human history, but that change in scope also allows it to focus on people as well as empires. Instead of playing an immortal ruler, you play one who really lives, getting married, having kids and eventually dying.

Then you play their heir. You have courtiers, spouses, children and rivals to worry about, and with this exploration of the human side of empire-building also comes a bounty of events, plots and surprises. You might even find yourself assassinated by a family member.

There's more than a hint of Crusader Kings here. You can't have a best strategy games list without a bit of Civ. Civilization 6 is our game of choice in the series right now, especially now that it's seen a couple of expansions.

The biggest change this time around is the district system, which unstacks cities in the way that its predecessor unstacked armies. Cities are now these sprawling things full of specialised areas that force you to really think about the future when you developing tiles.

The expansions added some more novel wrinkles that are very welcome but do stop short of revolutionising the venerable series. They introduce the concept of Golden Ages and Dark Ages, giving you bonuses and debuffs depending on your civilisation's development across the years, as well as climate change and environmental disasters.

It's a forward-thinking, modern Civ. This is a game about star-spanning empires that rise, stabilise and fall in the space of an afternoon: and, particularly, about the moment when the vast capital ships of those empires emerge from hyperspace above half-burning worlds. Diplomacy is an option too, of course, but also: giant spaceships.

Play the Rebellion expansion to enlarge said spaceships to ridiculous proportions. Stellaris takes an 'everything and the kicthen sink' approach to the space 4X. It's got a dose of EU4, Paradox's grand strategy game, but applied to a sci-fi game that contains everything from robotic uprisings to aliens living in black holes. It arguably tries to do to much and lacks the focus of some of the other genre greats, but as a celebration of interstellar sci-fi there are none that come close.

It's a liberating sandbox designed to generate a cavalcade of stories as you guide your species and empire through the stars, meddling with their genetic code, enslaving aliens, or consuming the galaxy as a ravenous hive of cunning insects.

Fantasy 4X Endless Legend is proof that you don't need to sacrifice story to make a compelling 4X game. Each of its asymmetrical factions sports all sorts of unique and unusual traits, elevated by story quests featuring some of the best writing in any strategy game. The Broken Lords, for instance, are vampiric ghosts living in suits of armour, wrestling with their dangerous nature; while the necrophage is a relentless force of nature that just wants to consume, ignoring diplomacy in favour of complete conquest.

Including the expansions, there are 13 factions, each blessed or cursed with their own strange quirks. Faction design doesn't get better than this. Civ in space is a convenient shorthand for Alpha Centauri, but a bit reductive. Brian Reynolds' ambitious 4X journey took us to a mind-worm-infested world and ditched nation states and empires in favour of ideological factions who were adamant that they could guide humanity to its next evolution. The techs, the conflicts, the characters— it was unlike any of its contemporaries and, with only a few exceptions, nobody has really attempted to replicate it.

Not even when Firaxis literally made a Civ in space, which wasn't very good. Alpha Centauri is as fascinating and weird now as it was back in '99, when we were first getting our taste of nerve stapling naughty drones and getting into yet another war with Sister Miriam. More than 20 years later, some of us are still holding out hope for Alpha Centauri 2.

Pick an Age of Wonders and you really can't go wrong. If sci-fi isn't your thing, absolutely give Age of Wonders 3 a try, but it's Age of Wonders: Planetfall that's got us all hot and bothered at the moment. Set in a galaxy that's waking up after a long period of decline, you've got to squabble over a lively world with a bunch of other ambitious factions that run the gamut from dinosaur-riding Amazons to psychic bugs.

The methodical empire building is a big improvement over its fantastical predecessors, benefiting from big changes to its structure and pace, but just as engaging are the turn-based tactical battles between highly customisable units. Stick lasers on giant lizards, give everyone jetpacks, and nurture your heroes like they're RPG protagonists—there's so much fiddling to do, and it's all great.

Set in an alternate 's Europe, factions duke it out with squishy soldiers, tanks and, the headline attraction, clunky steampunk mechs. There are plenty of them, from little exosuits to massive, smoke-spewing behemoths, and they're all a lot of fun to play with and, crucially, blow up. Iron Harvest does love its explosions.

When the dust settles after a big fight, you'll hardly recognise the area. Thanks to mortars, tank shells and mechs that can walk right through buildings, expect little to remain standing. The level of destruction is as impressive as it is grim. To cheer yourself up, you can watch a bear fight a mech. Each faction has a heroic unit, each accompanied by their very own pet.

All of them have some handy unique abilities, and yes, they can go toe-to-toe with massive war machines. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 's cosmic battles are spectacular. There's a trio of vaguely 4X-y campaigns following the three of the Warhammer 40K factions: The Imperium, Necron Empire and the nasty Tyranid Hives, but you can ignore them if you want and just dive into some messy skirmishes full of spiky space cathedrals colliding with giant, tentacle-covered leviathans.

The real-time tactical combat manages to be thrilling even when you're commanding the most sluggish of armadas. You need to manage a whole fleet while broadside attacks pound your hulls, enemies start boarding and your own crews turn mutinous.

And with all the tabletop factions present, you can experiment with countless fleet configurations and play with all sorts of weird weapons. Viking-themed RTS Northgard pays dues to Settlers and Age of Empires, but challenged us with its smart expansion systems that force you to plan your growth into new territories carefully.

Weather is important, too. You need to prepare for winter carefully, but if you tech up using 'lore' you might have better warm weather gear than your enemies, giving you a strategic advantage. Skip through the dull story, enjoy the well-designed campaign missions and then start the real fight in the skirmish mode. Mechanically, Homeworld is a phenomenal three-dimensional strategy game, among the first to successfully detach the RTS from a single plane.

If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or just fancy a good yarn in your RTS, you should play this. Thanks to the Homeworld Remastered Collection , it's aged very well. The remasters maintain Homeworld and its sequel's incredible atmosphere, along with all the other great bits, but with updated art, textures, audio, UI—the lot. Everything is in keeping with the spirit of the original, but it just looks and sounds better.

The different factions are so distinct, and have more personality than they did in the original game—hence Soviet squids and Allied dolphins. They found the right tonal balance between self-awareness and sincerity in the cutscenes, as well—they're played for laughs, but still entertain and engage. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak sounded almost sacrilegious at first. Over a decade since the last Homeworld game, it was going to take a game remembered for its spaceships and 3D movement and turn it into a ground-based RTS with tanks?

And it was a prequel? Yet in spite of all the ways this could have gone horribly wrong, Deserts of Kharak succeeds on almost every count. It's not only a terrific RTS that sets itself apart from the rest of the genre's recent games, but it's also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic.